Can we please get an example of a message, that is being sent from a SOAP Gateway client via http to an IMS SOAP Gateway, of course containing an X-dynaTrace tag?

Hi Chris, that's very helpful, thanks! Cheers, Christian

Hi Chris,

Ok so far. So the tag will be inserted on the client side. But who will do this injection ? Is that a dynatrace agent called by the client ? And the agent for the Soap Gateway will not be involved at all for this tagging. Correct ?

One question more : The HTTP part will not be forwarded to IMS over the SGW. So how comes this tag to IMS ?

Hello Jürg,

the X-dynaTrace tag is inserted by a Dynatrace agent in the JXJ tier before going via SOA Backplane into IMS SOAP Gateway. The X-dynaTrace tag is not going through to IMS, as it is dropped by SOAP Gateway. Therefore we need an agent there to be able to correlate the distributed transaction with the IMS transaction. The SOAP Gateway agent sends the X-dynaTrace tag and the IBM tracking ID via the Dynatrace Collector to the Dynatrace Server. This information can then be used to correlate the distributed transaction with the IMS transaction.

Hope this helps.

Best regards, Christian

Ok so tracking Id must be unique over all SOAP Gateways connected to the same collector. To guarantee that we need one collector per SGW !

What's happen if the collector doesn't get this info fast enough ?

In general this technic is not a very sophisticated. Smarter would be to insert the tag into the SOAP Header.

This way the tag would be sent to IMS automatically ! :-)

Hello Juerg,

The Dynatrace collector / server knows which SOAP Gateway agent set a particular tag, so the tag doesn’t need to be universally unique, it just needs to be unique within a single SOAP gateway process. As per IBM the IBM tracking ID is unique within a single SOAP gateway.

So multiple SGW agents can connect to one Collector.

We do not change the SOAP header, because that could affect the application, which we want to avoid for obvious reasons.

Best regards, Christian

Just as Info : There exists several official way to adjust the SOAP Header. CS also includes a own "CS-WsHeader" in the SOAP Header without affecting others.

Thanks, this is interesting information. Best regards, Christian

hi Jürg,

just a little more background information about (not) SOAP tagging: we thought about that in the past, but due to several reasons we decided against it:

1. Intrusiveness (as the other Christian already mentioned): we try to keep our message/request modifications as low as possible, because we ran into customers and their apps which would break because of them, even if the modifications were completely standards-conform (e.g. we already had customers which had problems with our 'X-' HTTP header, which should be completely ignored defined by the RFC)
2. Double-tagging: as we already tag the usually underlying HTTP protocol we could easily run into scenarios where we would double-tag a message/request, which could also result in e.g. 1 SOAP message being sent over multiple HTTP requests (as in your scenario). we already have prevention mechanisms for this, but in this case usually the outermost protocol wins, which would be again: HTTP. it's simply a matter of don't knowing what will be finally transported via HTTP.
3. Effort: we already have HTTP tagging in place for a lot of different technologies and implementations. implementing SOAP tagging would again mean that we would have to set up environments, create tests and write code for different technologies and implementations, though we already cover the mostly-used scenario (HTTP/SOAP) without that.

hope this helps understanding our decision making, Christian